Audio advancement - why?

Let me take a shot.
Music reproduction has to do with your ears and physical feeling in a room with it... Not complex number crunching storage devices, or flying an airplane.

So realistically your ears today or in 1950 would have been the same. Advanced audio today has to do with cheaper, better, faster, more reliable ways to keep it in your house more than anything, along with heat and efficiency, reliability. Not so much to how it sounds. The best guitar amps, pro studio equipment etc... still run on tubes, but there is also excellent or better solid state in some areas of audio depending how much your willing to spend.

This question and hobby unfortunately is totally disconnected from the standard "why has it not advanced" theory. Vinyl is crude and 90% of the time easily the recordings best the BEST sounding IPOD in the world! IPOD is advanced, its solid state, doest that mean it should beat a 10,000 dollar tube preamp and amp? Nope.

Video easily is explain as again video is seen, you can put one next to the other and compare with virtually no question from person to person. Audio is a whole different world and brain function, of course if you have bad eyesight and put on glasses all of a sudden you see things in high definition, of course if you are flying an airplane the best thing is reliability and accuracy not flying with vibration and failure sensitive tube devices.

Again has nothing to do with audio or the reproduction, heat, tubes, and analog period is how your ears work, digital and solid state are simply copies of reproducing it more efficiently but not necessarily better in all cases, faking it and making them as close as possible is all we are doing in home anyway, should a violin, grand piano or drum kit be solid state? Or should it still just create sound based on mechanical vibration? That of course has nothing to do with Tube vs. solid state, however reproducing it can.

Anyway bottom line is your ears work the same either way, what works for you? Natural sound can be had many ways, nobody has an answer to the best for every situation, but for sure the more artificial you make it sound, the less involving it can get, tubes and vinyl for example keep everything in the analog realm with no conversion, so it appeals to some more. But they have not necessarily discounted or realized you can in fact get similar or better results with "Higher" technology.

Solid state technology DOES have an answer to the imperfections of transistors cited by Atmasphere. Digital amps. (You could make a digital amp using tubes, but there would be no point to it). In a digital amp the output devices are full-on or full-off, so their linearity is a non-issue. The analog output is modulated by the duty cycle (ON/OFF timing) of the output devices, and there is no limit to the accuracy achievable, except cost.

Undertow said:

Advanced audio today has to do with cheaper, better, faster, more reliable ways to keep it in your house more than anything, along with heat and efficiency, reliability.

I think this is the answer in a nutshell. I don't think the early engineers said "let's develop SS because it sounds better." But, rather, the bean counters told the engineers to develop a way to produce electronics faster, cheaper and with greater reliability.

Eldartford, what you say is partially true- the problem is that the distortion signature still enhances odd-ordered harmonics.

Milpai, humans *were* able to make advances in audio- and it turns out that tubes are the way to do that- appropriate technology IOW.

Atmasphere - As far as I know class D amps enhance a little bit even harmonics (being slightly tube-like) and not the odd ones. It depends also on output configuration - from what I've heard full bridge amps (Icepower) sound more like very good tube amp while half bridge (Hypex) sound more like very good class AB. Tube amps have capacitors and transformers in the signal path - serious limitation in my opinion.

Eldartford - Early SS amps that won battle with tubes had THD in order of 0.00001% and tons of TIM thanks to insane use of global negative feedback. The problem was that TIM was discovered in 70s'. In really bad case output transistors are momentarily overdriven and stop responding for a moment after transition since charge at the junction is trapped and takes time to get out of the saturation. We don't hear tiny gaps in sound because our brains fills them but it makes us tired after a while. It cannot happen in class D. As for limitation - high power Mosfets are slower and carrier frequency is often too low, limiting bandwidth (smaller Icepowers have higher bandwidth than the large ones). 60kHz bandwidth might sound enough (200ASC) but phase shift jumps to 20 deg at 20kHz. Are harmonics added properly? Mosfets are getting faster and stronger every year and in near future class D will improve even further.
Today's class AB amps have gain before feedback often around 4000 while class A amps have gain of few hundred. I would rather have more THD and less bandwidth than TIM and blown-up upper odd harmonics - but good THD and bandwidth spects sell amplifier.